How to name your demons

A love letter from the mouth of a rat

It’s Sunday, two hours past my deadline and I’m just sitting down to write you. It’s been a heck of a week for all of us as we ride the pendulum from the extremes of one end of the emotional rollercoaster to the other. Our details are different, I’m sure, but they’re not the point. My feet have paced up and down the coast surrounding Boca Raton, so named not because the bay looks like a rat’s mouth (which was my guess), but because there are a thousand wretched tiny, biting rocks lining it’s entrance, and the unfiltered exclamation of a sailor stuck.

”Gah! Rat mouths!”

The mouth of the rat.

This was a time when poets waxed on about orchids, and cartographers documented the perils of navigation with equal linguistic dexterity. Beware - all who enter here.

This morning I watched the sun rise over a choppy ocean, through layers of clouds, serenaded by a chorus of codependent love songs blasted into the executive lounge at the top of the tower. It isn’t the dream of the 90’s that resides 26 floors above the water, but a soundtrack of a decade later - selected for or by folks a few years younger than me raised on the rising tide of Grey’s Anatomy rather than in lock-step, as I did.

the sun, rising

“I feel like I’m in the opening credits of a movie I don’t want to be a part of,” I say to the man in the ten dollar hoody who is here for the weekend as a gift to his adolescent daughter on her birthday.

He reciprocates the sentiment, lifts the hood of his shirt against the affront of the a/c and returns his gaze to the dashboard of devices perched between his caper-dappled bagel and the rays of sunshine piercing the veils of the lower atmosphere.

It’s my final day of a week-long stay, facilitated by chance, fate, and bravery, a trio quite familiar to anyone living a life worth writing about. Extreme luxury and fastidious faith are two things I wish could swallow me whole, but instead both feel superficial, like a wardrobe built for paper dolls. When I packed last Sunday it was for a three day trip, which has been extended by that much time again, reassuring me that I did indeed pack more clothing than I thought I needed, but just exactly as much as I actually did.

In case you’re in this for the lists (no one is), here is what I’ve got:
- four tank tops
- one sweater
- one long sleeved t
- one light zipper hoody
- one rain coat
- one pair workout shorts
- one workout bra
- one pair leggings
- one pair joggers
- one pair dressy shorts
- one pair ‘airplane pants’
- three dresses
- flip flops
- ‘dressy’ flats
- athletic-sandals (good enough for the elliptical or a walk into town)
- one swim suit
- one sarong
- one scarf
- one pair socks

I’ve worn it all (and much of it at once, as prior to our arrival the room was used to cure meats), a few things more than once. This collection has taken me from the airplane to the gym, to yoga, to the beach, through my pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s for the sacrament of kombucha. I’ve had two lovely dinners out with one more on the horizon. My regrets include running shoes instead of the sandals, as I really could have used something with more substance, and a pair of actual sweat pants to endure the punishing air conditioning that clouds the inner hallways.

Next time, I think, as if chronological time is a thing.

Because of the unearned status associated with my room number, I am relegated to the far end of the beach, beyond an arbitrary rope adjacent to the remaining turtle nests. They are roped off with a triangle orange tape wrapped around stakes.

devotional practice, observed by migrants to South Florida

This morning Juan, the gentleman who placed a towel on my chair and adjusted the beach umbrella to spare my neighbors the hilarity of watching a middling translucent white woman wrestle the pre-hurricane ocean breeze, informed me that these remaining turtle nests have been moved inland by fastidious humans. Apparently this effort is futile but feels necessary, as the hatchlings need the fortitude their flippers gain in the sand marathon between their aquatic hatching and any hopes of surviving the waves. Their chances are just north of zero.

My god, does that ever resonate.

Baby turtles are a miracle, worshiped by retirees from New Jersey who become nocturnal during nesting season in service of the faint possibility that one will make it to the next turn of the wheel. Not one nest, one singular turtle.

It reminds me of a Buddhist story about the precious, rare, and sacredness of human birth. A story that was once a life raft for me in a similarly tumultuous ocean of grief and intangible loss, and unexplained infertility. I’ll butcher it, but will do my best with the more salient bits.